Setup a Mock API Server with the json-server npm module

In this lesson we’ll install json-server as a dependency of our project so we can explore making API calls in a Redux-friendly way. We’ll update the scripts in package.json to allow us to run the server and verify it is responding by issuing a curl command.

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00:00 In order to set up a local server to test API calls against, we're going to add JSON-server as a dependency to this project. We'll do that using Yarn add JSON pick new server. Now that that's installed, let's get our project set up to use it.

00:18 I'm going to start by adding a new file to the root of my project, which I'm going to call "db.json." In db.json, I'm just going to paste in an object that has a to-dos property, which is an array of to-do objects, and I can save that file.

00:35 Then I'm going to open up package.json, and I'm going to add a script. I'm going to call that script "dev-server," and this is going to start up our JSON-server.

00:47 The command for that will be JSON-server. Then we're going to give it a specific port, so we're going to specify -p 8080, and then we're going to follow that up with the name of the file that's going to hold our data.

01:02 We'll save this, and then back in my terminal, I can try this out by running Yarn dev-server. We'll see that it issues our JSON-server command with our port and our file, and that we have the server running.

01:21 With that server running, I'm going to open a new tab in my terminal, and I'm just going to issue a curl command to get my to-dos. We'll curl to localhost:8080/todos and it returns the objects that are sitting in our db.json file.